Jean-Marie Reynier, Scappato di casa

The exhibition brings together images created with various analog techniques (unpublished editions, Polaroid, and Instax) over the past five years, a period that marked the artist's return to photography as the primary medium of his research. This intimate journey encompasses universal themes such as nature, affection, everyday life, illness, and death, intertwining memory, presence, and transformation.

Reynier began his passionate pursuit of photography during his studies at the CSIA in Lugano, but in the years that followed, his work focused first on printmaking, then on painting and drawing, collage, and various forms of installation, techniques that have allowed him to establish himself on the contemporary art scene. Five years ago, coinciding with the onset of a serious illness that left him hospitalized for a long time, Reynier reclaimed the medium of photography as the primary medium of his research. This choice, initially dictated by practical reasons, given his limited mobility and energy, has proven fruitful. Since 2021, Reynier has taken thousands of photographs, testing various types of cameras and black-and-white and color film, a photographic adventure that has allowed him not only to reorient his artistic journey but also to journey back through his life.

The sixty works selected for the Casa Pessina exhibition from this vast corpus are linked to the people and places that shape the artist's daily life: often suspended and ambiguous images, landscapes shrouded in fog, blurry faces and figures shot from behind, personal effects abandoned on a hospital bed, lake views that blur the line between water and sky, skulls placed next to rubber dragons or blooming daisies.

An “exploration of memory,” as Reynier defines it, through which the artist questions the very nature of the photographic gesture, trying to come to terms with the idea that a photograph, however capable of capturing a moment, cannot also retain the emotional experience that passed through it, and is therefore inevitably destined to vanish.